Source: www.jubileecampaign.org
Date: April 13, 2021
This Wednesday, April 14, 2021, is the seventh anniversary of the Chibok schoolgirl kidnapping, during which Boko Haram Islamist militants abducted a total of 276 Christian schoolgirls from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Nigeria. The kidnapping garnered responses and condemnations from numerous countries - including Canada, the United States, the European Union, Israel, and the United Kingdom - and was the largest every school kidnapping to take place in Nigeria, thus exacerbating concerns of Boko Haram's expanding capabilities.
Also of concern - and a major topic of discussion - was former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan and his government's inability to prevent the violence, especially considering that multiple sources claimed that authorities had received concerns of a pending attack. Moreover, the government was slow to respond. President Jonathan waited a whole two weeks after the abduction to make a public statement; he also rejected immediate offers from the US and the UK of search teams. The incident, and the subsequent video of Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau claiming that the girls would be sold, started an international campaign to #BringBackOurGirls.
However, a whole seven years after the mass abduction, still over 100 of the kidnapped girls remain missing. Hopes are raised, occasionally, when small groups of girls have been released or have escaped throughout the past half decade. But the international community is well-aware of the kind of life that the girls who remain in captivity are forced to endure. In March 2021, Naomi Adamu, a survivor of the Chibok kidnapping, revealed that during the three years she spent in Boko Haram captivity, she was repeatedly pressured to convert to Islam and marry one of the militant fighters; she refused every time. Now, Adamu is the main protagonist of a new book on the event, titled Chibok Girls.
Jubilee Campaign continues to call for the release, recovery, and rehabilitation into society of the 112 missing Nigerian Christian girls - now young women - who were uprooted from safety and kidnapped by Boko Haram that fateful night in 2014. Jubilee Campaign also condemns and expresses concern at the rise in school kidnappings in recent months and years, particularly through February and March 2021, including: the 2018 Dapchi Kidnapping, the 2021 Zamfara Kidnapping, the 2021 Kagara Kidnapping, and the 2020 Kankara Kidnapping.